In recent decades, authoritarian regimes have undergone a significant evolution, making them almost unrecognisable from the brittle behemoths of the late-Soviet era. This evolution has been supported by their rapid and often Spectacular adoption of technology, leading scholars to identify a phenomenon dubbed ‘digital authoritarianism.’ Questions have since emerged about the relationship between digital authoritarianism and pre-digital/conventional/offline authoritarian strategies, particularly whether digital authoritarianism is truly a new phenomenon. But while much conceptual work has argued that digital authoritarianism is ‘transformational’, this is not backed by empirical work on the matter that has emphasised a strong ongoing connection between digital authoritarian techniques and their pre-digital counterparts, and the more incremental, subtle effect of the phenomenon. This paper seeks to contribute to this debate by introducing a new cross-national dataset of the digital practices employed by 42 authoritarian and partly-free states between 2013-2025. It then analyses techniques for novelty or pre-digital/conventional antecedents, ultimately identifying two classes of digital authoritarian techniques: ‘Evolutionary’ tools that are either replace or enhance existing techniques, and those that are potentially ‘transformational’ for authoritarianism. It argues that while not all elements of digital authoritarianism are new, several elements of it have the potential to fundamentally transform authoritarianism.
